Flashes of Hope, Spring 2009

I'll keep saying it because it's true: I love photographing for the Madison WI chapter of Flashes of Hope. Trudy, the coordinator, is wonderful. The kids are an inspiration to me. They're strong, resilient, sometimes joyful, but also tentative, vulnerable, uncertain; sometimes tearful, other times full of laughter. They're tired of disease and the smell of hospitals and the machines of treatment. But they're riding with it.

I love being able to participate with other volunteers to provide portraits of these kids and their families during a very difficult time for them, a season of life when the last thing they'd be doing is scheduling portrait sessions. It's a beautiful gift to them, and who wouldn't love a chance to help make and give a beautiful gift to someone who's hurting? It's a privilege.

For an afternoon, we convert a conference room in the UW Children's Hospital into a "cozy" studio (smaller by a couple feet and it almost wouldn't work) and after any special makeup or selection of wigs or hats, we make a few photographs together to record this journey. Sometimes it's just the child, other times mom or dad or grandparents or siblings join in. The child might be a year old, or a teen.

The most difficult portrait I've made in the four times I've done this so far has been a trip to a 4 year old boy's hospital room a few weeks ago, he was immobile and unable to come to the studio, after surgery on his spine that week. We made some memorable portraits I think, but it was especially difficult for me -- trying to be sensitive to the mood in the room and to his pain; not wanting to intrude or disrupt his quiet; but also wanting to make some meaningful portraits of him and his sister and mom since they had accepted the offer from FOH. I haven't posted any of those portraits, they are somehow too personal and intense for me to feel comfortable yet, portraying them here.

Setup info for anyone who cares: these portraits are all shot with one light (a White Lightning X1600) through a 47" softbox, camera left; a white reflector camera right; and in this case, far enough away from the unlit canvas backdrop (somehow, in the tiny conference room) for falloff to render it very dark or black. Triggered with Pocketwizards. I like the soft light of the big softbox. I shoot with a 50mm 1.4 or a 105mm 2.8 or a 24-70 2.8 at 70mm; in all cases usually close to wide open aperture. I focus on the near eye and let the rest fall where it may. For groups, I stop down a little to gain some depth of field. I'm going to experiment next time with the background. I process everything in Adobe Lightroom, a wonderful tool.

We keep some stuffed toys at hand, and some bubbles. One of my tricks with kids is a stretchy bouncy squeezy goofy rubber thing (quick, trademark that name) from Walgreens which I sometimes rubberband to the lens hood. With very young kids, it gives me 1-2 minutes of curiosity, smiles, maybe even laughter, directed at my lens. Then they're bored with it. :-)

So that's the tech and gear side of things, which all needs to be reliably in place, well exposed and composed, in focus. A few dozen parameters to keep in mind. But all of this needs to become second-nature, because the most important part of portrait photography is helping the subject feel comfortable with me, with the room, with the process; and inviting them to participate in making the photographs. It's an invitation for them to let their personality show, and sometimes, if they're willing, to reveal some of their feelings about this difficult road they're traveling. All of that in a 10 or 15 minute window, with a total stranger, lights and lenses.

I don't mean to speak about this like I'm an expert who has arrived or figured it out, because I'm not. I always feel like I'm still learning and still have so much more to learn. Every person comes into the room with a unique personality and emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical presence. For a photographer, this is 9% physics and science, and 91% improvisation and adaptation. (For you math zealots: the other 28% is luck.)

I'm partly afraid of this (fear can be healthy!) and partly invigorated by the challenge because I enjoy collaborating with each person to make portraits which represent who they are (love overcomes fear!). When it all comes together just right, a portrait seems to reveal something genuine about who a person is inside.

Sometimes, after they leave the room, I think about what I should have done or said differently to make the mood, the process, the experience, and the outcome even better. That's learning, and I love it. Wouldn't photography be boring if there were no fear, no failure, nothing more to learn, no more room for improvement?

If you've read this far, thanks for reading, and please share your own thoughts or questions in the comments. And check out Flashes of Hope.

Exposure vs. Brightness

iPhone contemplates its own reflection

Worldwide Photowalk - Madison (slideshow)

I posted the rest of my selects from the Madison Photowalk on Flickr. Here's a slideshow:



And a brief side note, I finally installed a Lightroom plugin for exporting to my Flickr account, direct from Lightroom. There's another one I'll try soon for exporting to Facebook from Lightroom. This will save a LOT of time and file management! The Flickr one lets you choose sets (or make a new one), set keywords, etc.

Worldwide Photowalk - Madison

Here are a few of my photographs from Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photowalk on Saturday in Madison Wisconsin. I'll post a bigger selection on Flickr soon. More observations below.

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

My precioussss

Great music! (handheld, 1/2 second,
Martin sneaking up on the bass player)

"Talk to the hand."
This is in the running for my favorite.

So this was my first-ever photowalk. I've heard about photowalks and I've been partly intrigued and partly disinterested. The idea of walking en masse down a street with 50 photographers is not something I'm naturally drawn to.

Much of my photography is a solo venture, a lot of internal thought and instinct during my creative process, not very much of a community venture. So this was a stretch out of my comfort zone, and that's probably the main reason I participated. I was also curious about the experience, and don't like looking back at missed opportunities wishing I'd tried something.

I'm glad I did it - it was an engaging creative challenge to shoot around 450 images in two hours and end up with 50-60 that (to me) are interesting little moments and glimpses into downtown Madison and State Street. And I met some photographers, made some friends, and gained a couple new ideas for subject matter.

We had the whole gamut of photographers, from some working professionals to some point-and-shoot hobbyists. It was wonderful to see in virtually every direction someone framing and composing a little part of downtown Madison in their camera. If I could clone myself I'd spend the whole time just documenting the photographers and their encounters with people.

Moral of the story? Try anything at least once, and if it's as enjoyable and interesting as this was, plan on doing it again. I have some ideas for next year's photowalk if it works out for me to participate.

Not All Readers Are Created Equal

After delaying for no good reason, I recently bought a Lexar Firewire 800 reader, and it's fast. A little or a lot faster than the USB 2.0 transfer devices and workflow I've been used to for 8-9 years now.

My first digital images copied from a CF card, probably around 9 years ago, used a PCMCIA adaptor which took donkey's years to move files. For a short while I used a USB 1.1 reader, until I realized I could just shove bamboo splinters under my fingernails.

Things have come a long way. I did 3 quick tests today with a full 8GB Lexar Professional 300x UDMA CF Card. It had 7.44GB of images, 1,074 files (half each: JPG, Nikon NEF).

The target drive was a Seagate 1TB External Firewire 800, 7200RPM.

Here are the results, with 3 different CF readers:
Lexar Firewire 800 CF Reader = 4:34 (274 seconds)
Sandisk USB 2.0 CF Reader = 5:05 (305 seconds)
Dell LCD / USB 2.0 built-in CF Reader = 12:50 (770 seconds)

The Lexar Firewire 800 reader was 1.1 times faster than the Sandisk USB 2.0 reader (which really surprised me, I expected it to be closer to 2x) and 2.8 times faster than the DELL Monitor's built-in USB 2.0 reader. I'll not be using the built-in CF reader in the DELL any more, even though it can be very convenient.

And for reference: copying these same files directly between 2 Firewire 800 hard drives took 3:28 (208 seconds) -- 75% of the time to copy from the Lexar CF Reader to a hard drive over Firewire 800. So today's high end CF cards aren't doing to bad in terms of comparable transfer rate.

Sandisk also makes a Firewire 800 CF Reader and I have not tested it, I would expect it to be comparable to the speed of Lexar's reader. I think Rob Galbraith has done some comparisons on these (is there anything he's not compared?) but I've not studied them.

Now I'll be honest, 4.5 minutes still seems like a long time to wait, copying files off an 8GB card. If you have four full 8GB cards from a shoot, even with Firewire 800 that would be about 20 minutes of transfer time... waiting.

I realize this sounds impatient. I'm simply making the point that anything which has us waiting for the computer is by definition a workflow bottleneck, in this case partly caused by the growing data size of today's digital images, and partly caused by the current limitations of bandwidth constraints.

For now, I'll happily take a speed increase factor of 1.1 or 2.8.

And, contrary to my expectations Sandisk's USB 2.0 reader is only 10% slower than the Firewire 800 reader, making it still a very good option. I like to have an extra CF reader handy in my camera bag and light kit.

Madison Aerial Sunset

Yesterday I did some aerial photography of the downtown Madison skyline at sunset. I could do this every day, no complaints.

For anyone unfamiliar with Madison: Monona Bay on the left, Lake Monona on the right, Lake Mendota on the horizon, and the Capitol building on the right, on the Isthmus. And the other tall building near the middle is Van Hise (UW Madison) where I studied Arabic and Hindi. :-)

Have Bike, Will Stand

Mainly a runner, MC is experimenting with triathlons, he's done a couple "sprint" triathlons and half marathons. We shot a few images in the studio the other day with his bike.

White continuous, WL X1600 + softbox upper left, fill reflectors on right, 2 speedlights with umbrellas for the wash.

Exposure: Over, Under, or Neither?

Over the past few years I have heard and read various arguments for how to expose digital images. Over-expose? Under-expose? Neither? I want to offer a few thoughts about balancing these arguments in light of each photographic situation.

For starters, if it needs to be said, virtually everyone who can shoot "RAW" images should be doing so. A camera-raw image holds much more information than a compressed JPG file which the camera can make by throwing away information it decides will not be needed, in a split second based on predetermined criteria chosen by the camera manufacturer.

It might be a perfectly fine JPG file, but it's a reader's digest version of the full RAW file.

And secondly, a very common photographic challenge is to somehow capture and store (either on a piece of film or a digital sensor and file) the large range of dark and bright information which our eyes can so easily take in.

With photographs, often a sacrifice must be made, to preserve the details in the brightest areas of an image at the expense of the details in the shadows; or vice versa. The "dynamic range" of a human eye is huge - the range of brighter and darker exposure values which can be taken in as part of a scene.

The dynamic range of color negative film is about 8-10 exposure stops. The dynamic range of color slide film (which Kodak just discontinued - Kodachrome, the longest and best regarded slide film) is about 6 exposure stops. Because slides are projected as-is, they need to be exposed correctly.

The dynamic range of a digital sensor today is 5-12 exposure stops depending on the camera. The higher dynamic range is only found in higher end DSLRs costing several thousand dollars. This is rapidly changing of course, as the search for the digital sensor holy grail continues.

That should be enough background. Regarding digital exposure, there are three approaches: over-expose by about 1-2 stops; under-expose by about 1-2 stops; or do neither -- seek an "accurate" exposure for the subject that neither favors the highlights nor the shadows. The game plan, in all cases, is to try to recover useful image information (captured by the sensor and stored in the RAW file) in the darkest and the brightest areas of an image.

1) The over-expose strategy. This is sometimes called "Expose to the right," which refers to the histogram: choosing to expose images so that there's more information crowding the brighter (right) side of the histogram (which all DSLRs and some point-n-shoot digitals provide on the LCD display) and there is little or no "clipping" of blacks and shadow detail on the left side of the histogram. The argument here is that it's easier to recover highlight details out of the nuanced exposure information from a RAW file than it is to do so with details in the shadows.

2) The under-expose strategy. Not everyone agrees with the "expose to the right" approach. I just listened to a podcast where a respected photographer was advocating exposing for good preservation of highlight details even if this means the shadows are clipped and end up crowding the left side of the histogram, with the expectation that these can be recovered relatively more easily from the RAW file than is the case with highlights. Basically, approaches 1 and 2 are opposites. Opinions differ, and people can back their opinions with anecdotal experience.

3) The "neither" strategy. When shooting slide film, this was the only choice. Shooting even 1/2 stop over or under would result in an image on slide film (projected on a screen) that looks incorrectly exposed. And even though digital sensors and raw files allow for a range of choices to be made after the image is captured, some would advocate that the best approach is to accurately expose the overall image on average, leaving room to pull details from either the shadows and the highlights (or both) back into an edited image for the screen or for print.

My argument with all the above is that it depends. Specifically, it depends on at least three things, and we're assuming for this discussion that the image is being recorded to camera raw, not just to a JPG file. It depends on the subject, the camera, and the intent for the image.

First, what is the subject matter? Does the image being captured have a huge dynamic range of 15-20 stops of information, such as a sunlit marketplace with trees and shiny roofs and faces peering out from doorways and windows? Or is it a soft lit portrait of one of those faces surrounded by the darkness of the interior? Is it a macro of a flower? Is it a bride in a white dress, with African skin tones, and surrounded by a wedding party with varying skin tones and some of them wearing black tuxes?

In each case, how the image should best be exposed depends on the subject and the light which makes it visible to the camera. There is no simplistic, universal approach like "expose to the right" or "expose for the highlights" or "just expose it accurately!" :-)

Second, what camera is recording the image, and what kind of digital raw file does its sensor create? Is it capable of some of the highest dynamic range that today's best sensors can achieve? Or is it a 4 year old DSLR which makes a very nice image but may have only 7-8 stops of dynamic range on a good day?

Third, what is the intent for the image? If it is for family prints and shared Flickr sets, or a print ad campaign, or a fine art gallery show, or wedding enlargements, or a coffee table book -- each of these intended uses for the images might inform the best arguments for how best to expose the images. There's no one golden rule of exposure that best suits the many ways images might be used.

One rule that does apply to almost all images, whatever the exposure, is that post-production is an important part of making the image. A careful study, on a calibrated monitor, of the shadows and highlights, and an evaluation of what information can be recovered, and which information should be favored when we can't "have it all." Because we can't. Photographs don't yet store the information our eyes could see when we saw the scene. The challenge is to make our best effort at capturing the best essense of a scene and representing it later.

How do you expose digital images? Over? Under? Neither? I'm interested to hear your comments.

Nikon Lenses Rants and (mostly) Raves

I feel like slightly ranting, and mostly raving.

Can I just say this? I love my Nikon Nikkor lenses.

And FYI, this is a "big picture" blog post, not a techy nitty gritty post about lenses.

A lense, made up of many groups and elements of ground glass, takes in light from an image which might be inches or meters or miles away, and focuses it on a piece of film or a digital sensor. This is a small miracle. To do this with the high quality with which today's lenses are capable is a bigger-than-small miracle. It might be scientific to a certain degree, but like most of science, it's also miraculous.

As professional SLR brands go, my experience has been 100% Olympus with film, and for the past 6+ years is now 100% Nikon with digital. (I still have an Olympus OM-1n film camera and love it, more on that some other day.)

30 years ago I cut my teeth on some really nice Olympus Zuiko and Tamron SP lenses, and I've had a couple very good Sigma lenses over the years too. (In my youth, a Tamron 80-200 was on my camera about 80% to 200% of the time.)

But today, I do love the quality of the Nikon / Nikkor lenses in my kit. I prefer Nikkor's higher quality ED glass, and I like fast glass.

The main lenses I regularly use today are 3 primes and 3 zooms, all Nikkor:

• 24-70mm 2.8 (main lens on my D700)
  
• 17-55 2.8 (approx DX equivalent to the 24-70; main lens on my D300)
• 105mm 2.8 VR micro
• 50mm 1.4
  
• 10.5mm 2.8 (DX, usually attached to my D300)
• 70-300 4.5-5.6 VR (a cheaper but really good lens, just not as fast)
  

My next lens might be Nikon's 70-200 2.8 VR, although with the D700 I get an extra 2-4 stops of usable extra "speed" (courtesy of higher ISO) to work with and therefore the need for a faster zoom than the one I have is relaxed quite a bit. If I do go this direction, I'd get this faster (2.8) telephoto zoom mainly for the narrower depth of field around the 60-100 range for portraits (compared with my 70-300's 4.5-5.6) and a faster VR-assisted performance for longer, fast action stuff like sports.

Balancing these things, the 70-300 Nikkor I already have makes a very nice image, and is much more portable. I would need a different camera bag to carry the 70-200 2.8 with my kit. :-/

My only super wide currently is the 10.5mm DX lens, which doesn't cover the D700's full frame, although I can shoot a very usable (if lower res) wide image with it on the FX sensor, and I've done that a few times.

Three other lenses I'm interested in are the Nikkor 14-24 (to fill the focal gap; and some architectural stuff I do) and the Nikkor 85 f/1.4 (for individual portraits with very narrow dof) and a longer fast prime (400mm or more) for wildlife stuff and sports. And for the moon, I love to shoot the moon.

Lenses. There are always more of them. And one can always dream, right? But the point is to make great images, not accumulate lenses.

As I mentioned, I like fast glass. Part of the reason in the past was that I like to shoot handheld, and shooting people and events that are on the move (while I too am on the move) and when the light might be on the low side is much easier to do with a wide aperture.

The second reason I like fast glass is I love bokeh and separation from the background. Aside from some cultural documentary and event photography and certain macro scenarios, I'm often at or very close to wide open, on my fastest lenses.

Fast glass is expensive, heavy, bulky... and worth it all.

Raves? I do have them, one for each lens.

• My 105mm 2.8 "micro" (the rest of the world calls this "macro" except Nikon) is an amaaaazing lens. I use it all the time for macro photography, individual portraits, and even some landscapes and wildlife. It has wonderful bokeh, separation, macro capability, and can focus about a foot away from the subject. I use its VR some but not a lot, usually when doing handheld macro photography. If the subject's not moving (wind, etc.) and VR is helping me on the camera side, I can get crisp images.
  
• I love the 50mm 1.4 for individual and group portraits, low light, streetwalking. It has beautiful bokeh, and wonderful separation at f/1.4 or slightly closed down. It's so nicely compact. And it has an aperture ring on it. I (don't use but) love that!
  
• I love the 24-70 f/2.8 for groups, portraits, landscape, architecture, and event photography. This is the lens I usually keep on the camera. (The 17-55mm is comparably wonderful, on the D300, but I'm usually shooting this 24-70 on the D700)
  
• I love the 70-300 (on a DX body this zooms to an equivalent 450mm!) with it's VR and light weight. I do some portraits with this, especially outdoors with just 1-2 people. In spite of the smaller slower glass it produces very nice images. The VR is nice, esp. at 300mm.
  
• I love the 10.4mm fisheye even though it's a DX lens and doesn't cover my FX sensor; I've still used it on the D700 for some very usable images. It can focus up to an inch away! It's an awesome lens. Thanks Nikon! It's wonderful on the D300. Actually, it's my main lens on the D300. It's my "Fish on a Stick". More on that some other day. :-)
  

Rants? Gripes? I have very few. For now, I do have TWO.

• First, something I am confident will never change, I resent the decision Nikon made in the very early beginning days to use a "backwards" rotation to attach the lens to the camera. Completely unnecessary mistake by Nikon! And even though I've been using Nikon cameras and lenses almost daily for 6+ years, it's still partly counter intuitive. Lefty Loosy, Righty Tighty. I don't actually ever use that reminder, but I do instinctively know which way things go "tight" and which way things go "loose," this is universal and worldwide. Why, oh Nikon, did you do the opposite? I think there's probably no good reason you couldn't have reversed the mount so it was compatible with THE WHOLE FURGEN RESTA DA WORLD. But no. And now it's too late to change because on the other hand, the AMAZING thing you have accomplished is virtual compatibility between your oldest and newest lenses and bodies. There's no going back now. OK, rant #1 is over, I'll try not to bring it up again. (breathe)
  
• My 105mm 2.8 is the only Nikkor lens I've ever used that has serious problems auto focusing. It will very slowly "hunt" its way (usually in the wrong direction and eventually back again) to find focus even when it was very close to focus or even ON focus to begin with. By slow, I mean, several (3-5) seconds! I have used this lens on four (4) Nikon DSLR cameras, always with the same result. This lens, which produces amazing images, is the only one one I know that's dubious of the Nikkor name for this stated reason.
  

A couple thoughts on DX and FX lenses. I'd very seriously hesitate at this point in time to buy another DX lens. Part of the reason is I think the smaller sensor DX format will eventually go away in Nikon's DSLRs. (My guess is within about 4 years.) A DX lens is designed to project its "deliverable" image on a smaller area than the newer, better "full frame" FX sensors.

Since Nikon does and will increasingly continue to make great glass for the relatively newer FX digital sensor size (which does remain compatible with DX sensors too, those cameras simply use less of the image delivered to the focal plane by the lens), there's a much bigger risk of lost investment in a DX lens than a normal lens that covers a full 35mm frame area.

Having said all of the above, life has constraints, and not only am I willing to live within constraints, and not only do the lenses I already own provide a huge creative lattitude to make the images I love to make; but I believe my creative efforts will thrive more when I work within constraints rather than without them.

Meanwhile, Nikon: please keep making great lenses, please apologize to each of us some day (a free new lens would do) for the wrong-twist-direction thing; and thanks for the wonderful tools.

Tunnel Vision

Sometimes tunnel vision is necessary, to see the light at the end of it.

Concerts on the Square Makeup Session

Well now that's more like it.

Concerts on the Square Canceled

Disappointment.